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I just saw Rogue One (in 2D) last night. I was finally able to make sense of the last third of the movie (I was waaayyyyy too close to the screen the first time, in 3D)

So, that long-winded opening being what it is... I want to dust off my Armada starter set. My hobby budget having been leaner this past year, I can afford to buy a ship and a pack of fighters every month, say. I'm aiming to get the most bang for each buck though, and I'm not super kosher about having the cards, I can use the SWAFT fleet builder, and I want to focus on Rebels. Should I just follow the release schedule?

possibly. the new pheonix home looks like it might be a must have. it gives you rapid launch bays.

"Before deploying fleets, you may set aside a number of friendly squadrons up to your squadron value next to your ship card.

Icon Command Squadron: For each squadron you would activate with this command, you may instead place 1 of your set-aside squadrons within distance 1. It cannot move this activation."

i'm planning on getting one for my imperials

The damn tiny TIE fighters are damn tiny, though! I can't stand not having them painted. Is long, is all. I'm getting old.

So Assault Frigate Mk II, and a basic pack of fighter to get the Bs, As and Ys.

Month two, Rogues and Villains and another Nebulon-B and Corvette... then on to the good stuff?

i would say so. i'm only now just getting into the game myself

Yeah, around here drumming up interest for Armada has been close to impossible. Several folks have tried in different areas and it just keeps petering out. I've been keeping up with Imperials, but there's no one to play - they're all playing X-wing.

This game needs some sort of shot in the arm - it's plenty tactical, but it's not as whiz-bang exciting as X-wing appears to be. The unpainted fighters don't help promote the game - it actually makes it feel "cheaper" than X-wing in some ways. New releases also seem painfully slow.

The release schedule seems a bit more fast paced for X-Wing. I can understand that you can just plop down 3 or four fighters and get it going, whereas Armada is a bit more like playing Epic. You have to email each other for 2 weeks, make sure there are babysitters involved, as well as lunch and drinks planned, and a bit more real estate.

Happily, I've found a NASA image of the Orion Nebula that I'll be able to slice 36'' x 72'' of sweet, real space.

Another problem with Armada is that a lot of people scratched their Star Wars itch with X-wing, and simply can't afford to just jump into another game.

It is indeed more expensive. But I have a pretty restrictive budget (I can't afford new 40K armies, say) and even I can jump into Armada progressively. I agree that the starter kit is just wonky. I think they should have done 2 small ships and 3 squadrons per side. That would have been enough, imho.

I'd say it's less expensive than Armada as there is less compulsion to buy expansion's purely for the cards. You can simply buy the expansions you want and still play competitively.

I love X-Wing, but IMHO Armada is the superior game. A minority opinion I know, but it's mine.

I was a BFG fan for so many years. So intellectually, I'm with you. My heart just loves to pew pew.

Home one and mc30s are my favs. I haven't got to mess around with the new waves though. The new campaign adds a ton of flavor I think.

I was actually eyeing the Liberty... a kind of budget Home One? As long as I get a big ship on each side, I'll be happy.

Just noticed another wave was just released.

On the Imperial side, the Gladiator has been a surprisingly good ship. Imperial Star Destroyer is scary, but it's too slow to catch a nimble Rebel fleet.

Overall, at least up to this wave (haven't gotten that yet...), it appears the Rebels have the better starfighters, but it seems the Imps have the better capital ships.

Yeah, from what I'm seeing in my community, I'm goin g to have to carry both fleets, because only one other friends has any lasting interest in the game.

So, Gladiator and Raider for Imperial smaller ships?

This is all IMHO, but, from what I have managed to play, this is my read of the Imperial ships:

From what I've seen, two Gladiators seems to be the build for putting a hurt on capital ships. A single Gladiator is nice, but two working in tandem are more than a match for dealing with larger capital ships; raiders are the anti-star fighter kings, but die quickly to any sort of capital ship.

The Victory comes across to me as a Jack-of-All trades; good for intimidating smaller capital ships and brawling single capital ships of its size or smaller. It's capable of pursuing rebel capital ships, but can get into trouble if left by itself. It is most vulnerable from attacks to its rear, so watch for fast enemy ships trying to flank you.

The Immobilizer is focused firepower. Use it to concentrate your forces on one enemy ship - the bigger the enemy, the better. It can disable/hobble the capital ship and then destroy that enemy ship with everything supporting the immobilizer (and the immobilizer itself carries quite a punch too).

The Imperial Star Destroyer is an Area Denial unit and damage sponge. A combined assault can bring it down, but it will occupy the enemy's time to do so; keeping it at arm's length is a better way to beat it, as it's easy to outmaneuver. Playing the ISD, you want to get it to a prominent location and then turtle. You want to force the enemy to come to you, and then plaster it with everything you can muster. Keep a speedy unit nearby to finish anything that attempts to run away after getting a taste of the ISD's big guns.

For the Empire, don't waste a lot of points of star fighters; you will need some ships to screen your capital ships, but the rebel starfighters are superior on a 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 basis. Your fighters are going to die in droves; they're just around to tie up and occupy the enemy fighters so your capital ships can do their work. If you lose your starfighter screen, keep your capital ships moving at a decent clip, and they will be relatively safe from most starfighters.

Dreams and plans being what they are, they have to bend to the reality of the market. Seeing as I am one to support what is really an amazing FLGS, I bought what was on the shelves. I also got money for Xmas with express orders to "buy what would make me happy." Plus the shop was running a 20% off everything in the store so...

I got my mitts on the following:
Rebel Fighter Squadrons (kind of a good starting point)
Rogues and Villains (dual purpose kits are always a good idea)
Assault Frigate Mark II (Needed something to go toe-to-toe with a Victory class)
Phoenix Home (I love Rebels and it was the last one)
Imperial Light Cruiser (I love cruisers made entirely of light)

Since I'll likely have to carry the weight of both sides to entice people to play with me, I figured getting a few options to thicken the Imperial side would be in order. I had planned on getting a Gladiator or a couple of Raiders, but all that was left were the Arquitens, a pack of Gozantis and the Imperial class. A bit too rich for my taste at the moment, and I was worried it would make for lopsided battles.

It would probably be assymetrical, not lopsided - FFG is fairly good at balancing their games.

I like the Imperial's firepower, but I've also seen lists do well that rely on mobility. However, most people seem to prefer to outshoot instead of outmaneuver their opponent. Former tends to be a matter of mathematical odds, the latter relies much more on being more skillful than your opponent.

I added a second CR90 corvette for the titles and a Raider to my Imperial stable.

We played two games last night. One was just a fleet bash which I promptly had to withdraw from, both of my ships were severely wounded by the time the initial pass across the Victory's bow was done. I had very sucky dice in the squadron phase, so all my x-wings were decimated by relentless tie fighter fire.

We picked an Intel Sweep for the second game, and I decided to play keep away with one of my ships, with half the x-wings. I was able to engage the Victory class with fighters, but they accomplished very little. I concentrated on navigating as close to the objectives as I could, and scored a victory that time, losing fewer fighters as well.

I agreed that lopsided was meant more as a points weight, rather than a matched forces way of speaking. I'm guessing that at even points, any fleet could pull its own weight, as long as you remember the objective, of course.

So... mistakes were made. Especially since I had to buy a new duvet coat.

I added a flotilla of GR-75 and the new Rebel fighter squadrons. The casting quality on the Lancers and VCX 100s is impressive. They are actually going to be a joy to paint.

I'm a bit mystified by the lack of a strong meta in the game. I know there aren't that many ships, but from what I can gather, it is quite possible to tailor a list to your liking and playstyle and win. There also seems to be this weird push to actively try to be the second player in order to have one of your objectives selected. Sure, you'll go second, but even that is far from a disadvantage if you maneuver right. As in well, not opposite of left.

The glory is there is no meta. There are a couple of squadron pseudo-metas, where a group of squadrons tied together with the special rules of an ace are widely taken (Major Rhymer leading Imperial bombing runs, for example, is a biggie), but the awesome thing is that with the appropriate skill and planning, every single ship that you want to fly has an appropriate place in a fleet build.

There are definitely "best builds" within ships, like Corvette-B's work awesome with certain Ion Cannon upgrades, buffed with cards that effect blue dice or re-rolls ...but that's exactly what that ship type is built for, with all it's blue dice.

There is no easy button fleet builds for either side, as of yet. My last game was only my third ever with my regular gaming partner, but I flew a horde of 5 small-sized ships against 3 Star Destroyers (two Victory's and one Imperial), and despite the Imperial's ability to completely one-shot a corvette that got too cocky with, with good piloting I still was able to fly around and do damage to those three big monsters, and the game felt as balanced as any in my 20-year experience.

I wasn't sure it could, but it's working pretty well at replacing Battlefleet Gothic, the death of which I have mourned for so many years.

Yeah, bigly. I was very good at BFG. But the maneuver tool makes the game a bit more precise, which I like.

And squadrons can do a bit more than in BFG.

I kinda feel the squadrons are roughly comparable in Armada to Escorts in BFG, though obviously they are alot more survivable with more than 1 Hit point.

The only thing I'm not the fondest of is the amount of cardboard gaming paraphernalia FFG games tend to spread all over the table, but at least all those defense tokens, etc. mesh together well.

That's why third parties excel at selling us acrylic tokens!!!

Actually I mean that FFG games have a penchant for tons of moving play material parts on the table at once, mostly tokens.

BFG (if I remember those foggy days right) was to the tune of: one or two sheets of ship profiles to read and mark damage on, fighter/bomber/torpedo tokens as needed, range ruler and dice, order dice/homemade order tokens appearing as needed- not counting ships and terrain.

But Armada has, all at once:

-Ship and Squadron cards and upgrade cards for ships.
-Dice
-Movement tool
-Range ruler/s
-Command dials and tokens
-Speed dial
-Defense tokens
-Damage cards with deck

It's a helluva lot of informational clutter for tabletop newbies to take in at once, but if managed right, they all have a worthwhile place in the game. My dad (who has only played a few hex-and-counter wargames)is now my regular Armada opponent, and once he got past the overload and we found some organizational mods, he agrees it's a great game. He really never got into playing 40k with me all those years back, I wish we had Armada (X-wing, too) back when I was a teen; we would have gotten a lot more gaming experiences in.

It's a bit crunchier, but I think it's worth it.

For instance, movement was often a debate in BFG because of the round base and the need for a protractor in order to calculate maximum angles of turning.

And as an aside, the fact that ships aren't pewter makes them that much less damgerous when thrown by an irate opponent. Happened to me once. Eldar ships are pointy.

And although I agree that the real estate required by the cards and their upgrades (we use a side table at the moment), the customization possible in Armada is a godsend. We're not stuck with dud ships or precise builds to lift marginal ships to one trick ponies.

My main gripe, if you can call it that, is the need to buy a second maneuver tool in order to build a shorter one.

Yeah, I am a big fan of having two versions of any sjip to start with, and then the near endless build variation with upgrades. Removes all the pondering of "which would be the best variant to build forever, or should I take tons of time to magnetize to maximize variants". Or worse yet, have 6-10 Imperial Cruisers in the collection to make sure to cover all the bases on useful variants. I think just my Imperial fleet is a large as my entire Armada collection, and I buy both sides and have several more cap ships than I can use in one game for each.

Also, I bought another maneuver tool so I'd have a "4" and a "2" for tighter quarters, but I might even buy another to make a "3".

Well, my fleet has slowly been expanding of late, picked up another Imperial SD (at 40% off!!!), the new imperial squadrons and the imperial light cruiser - the latter adds what looks like some really, really useful cards.

I do agree about the maneuver tool - playing imperials having an extra tool only 2 long is really useful.

Personally, I've not really been impressed with squadrons, but maybe it's because of which ones I've been running. Don't get me wrong - you CAN mess up an undefended capital ships with squadrons, but I wish they had made it that squadrons can shoot & move instead of shoot OR move. (And basic ties seem like they should be one point cheaper).

I'm hoping we'll see a lot more capital ships from Rebels and Rogue One soon. Even if I don't get to play much, there's still a ton of capital ships I'd love to get my hands on just to drool over.

BTW, does anyone have any Armada fleet building websites/software they prefer? I'm not fond of hand-building lists, too easy to miss something when adding up points.

http://armadawarlords.hivelabs.solutions

Easily the best one out there. Comes heavily recommended by people on the FFG forums, which incidently are a pretty great group. Stupidly user friendly.

 Stormonu wrote:
BTW, does anyone have any Armada fleet building websites/software they prefer? I'm not fond of hand-building lists, too easy to miss something when adding up points.

Yeah, I've been amazed that there hasn't been a variant of Startactics or the UK xwing builder

 AegisGrimm wrote:
http://armadawarlords.hivelabs.solutions

Easily the best one out there. Comes heavily recommended by people on the FFG forums, which incidently are a pretty great group. Stupidly user friendly.

Thanks! I also am glad to see it has a ship database - not having most of the rebel ships, I can now see what I'm missing out on, and what they are capable of!